Recently, smart phones have been designed in order to swap between antennas provided within oppositely disposed sections of the smart phone. This allows the smart phone to select the best antenna for RF communication given as conditions change (e.g., user's hand is blocking one antenna more than another antenna relative to the base station). However, in this case, since the antennas are in oppositely disposed sections of the smart phone, the RF signals may sometimes have to be transmitted a few hundred millimeters through the smart phone between RF transceiver circuitry and the selected antenna. Furthermore, recent radio frequency (RF) communication standards require that RF signals operate within high frequency ranges. For example, RF signals formatted in accordance with Long Term Evolution (LTE)-Time Division Duplex (TDD) bands such as band 42, band 43, or License Assisted Access (LAA) are in RF communication bands between 3.5 GHz to 5.5 GHz. At these high frequencies, RF receiver signals can experience significant degradation and large insertion losses when having to propagate a few hundred millimeters between the antenna used for reception and the RF receive chains that process the RF receive signals. Typical receive chains are often not sufficiently sensitive and manufacturing RF receive chains with the sensitivity need to process these degraded RF receive signals at these frequency ranges is costly.
Thus, circuitry for smart phones and other portable communication devices are need that allow for antenna swapping but provide for less degradation and lower insertion losses of RF signals.